25 April 2004. I can't remember if I've mentioned it here yet, but I hope to write an essay in response to several published essays that are being discussed at New-Poetry of late. Two are responses to Garrison Keillor's anthology, Good Poems, by Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler that appeared in the most recent issue of Poetry. A third is an editorial by Christian Wiman. Another closely related essay is one by Eric Ormsby that's in the latest issue of The New Criterion. I found all four essays part conventionally unexceptionable and part fatuous. They all also purpose to cover the current poetry scene in America, and don't come close to doing so, which is my principal gripe with them. I hope to use them as a means to actually giving a sense of what's out there, and what the best poetry, entirely ignored by such as Gioia, Kleinzahler, Wiman and Ormsby, not to mention Keillor, has to contend with.

I expect to need several weeks to get this essay done. To help, I've decided to post fragments of it and notes and questions at New-Poetry, and also here, so taking care of my blog duties while getting the essay together. So: expect installments here over the next few weeks. This is the first of them. It has to do with what I and many others take to be the most common poem now being written in our country. It has been dominant for some thirty or more years. The Iowa Workshop Poem.

A 100% Iowa Workshop Poem is a poem that:

1. involves quotidian, usually suburban subject matter

2. uses understated near-prose (i.e., free verse with few or no frills or unconventionalities of expression)

3. ends with a standard epiphany or anti-epiphany

4. is genteel in vocabulary and morality

5. strives for anthroceptual sensitivity (i.e., sympathetic awareness of other human beings)

6. acts as a means to self-expression, or bringing the self to life as opposed to capturing a scene, some object or idea--never as an end in itself, as a beautiful verbal artifact

7. features telling concrete details out of everyday life

8. avoids gaudy metaphors and other forms of verbal splashiness

9. wouldn't be caught dead harboring a poetic technique not in wide use by 1950 at the latest

10. is not controversial in thought or attitude, or--really--close to explicitly ideational

11. tends to be indirect, subtle

12. is first-person

13. is generally short--one to three pages in length--never long.

Odd, my impression was that I'd written quite a few 100% Iowa Workshop Poems, but when I started going through my files to find some examples of them for this essay, I realized I haven't. My Poem poems, for instance, are in the third person, and are almost always guilty of one kind of burstnorm funny business or another. Even poems of mine from thirty years ago like the one below:

Saturday Interval

In the park just down the road
from the rear-view mirror factory where I work, 
and about a mile from the room I rent,
I sit by myself among scattered
stonefuls of midsummer sun,
brooknoise,
and patches of daisies.
I've brought a book
but haven't bothered to open it.

From time to time Persephones climb
through the stones' slow pulse
or into the affections
of the flowering fields,
but never,
even briefly,
down
my darkening.

Here's another poem of mine I thought for sure was a 100% Iowa Workshop Poem:

The Canoe

Head unbent,
the boy faces his father.
A blue canoe from a poem he'd write
more than twenty years later
is beached an rotting
somewhere on the outskirts
of the tension between them.
Forever once
as a child of four
he had ridden that canoe
out of his mother'sstrawberry winds
and into the midst of island and gulls
on the fringe of the great wide sea.
His father had done the paddling,
picnic-eyed and strong in a summer Saturday.

But it is another season now
and the boy faces an older father,
a father pale and strange
in the adolescence the boy can't help
taunting him from.

It is a different season now, and years will go by
before the boy reflects upon,
or even notices 
from the dark margins of the moment
the shine of the blue at its center.

Note: this post is a first draft, although also a fiftieth draft of opinions I'm always tossing around, so I'd be grateful for any comments. I'm especially looking for additions to my list. Subtractions? Refinements, for sure.